Joan rents a run-down property in Topanga Canyon and insinuates herself into Alice’s life. She drives to Los Angeles to find Alice – who we gradually realise is her half-sister. The opening sets the tone of high drama, with Joan fleeing New York after her former lover shoots himself in front of her, in a restaurant where she’s dining with another married lover. The book is dense with foreshadowing and jaded, vampy generalisations: ‘Most men are crabs, crawling around with their pincers out’. Everyone loves a remorseless antiheroine, and Taddeo gives us one to remember, but there are only so many times you can listen to someone tell you that they’re depraved. It’s like Greek tragedy retold by Susanna Moore or Darcey Steinke Medea meets Vanity Fair meets Promising Young Woman. The novel is carnal, drenched in sex and blood. Yet where Three Women was narrated in a close third person, Animal is all vulpine first. It shares its predecessor’s intensity, an unflinching candour that chimed with readers who saw their private hurts and humiliations reflected in these true stories. Thematically, Animal marks a logical progression, exploring trauma, the male gaze, and the influence of childhood attachments on relationships throughout life. Written over nearly a decade, the latter was an intimate investigation into the sexual and emotional lives of three women in America, and was a number one bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. All eyes are trained on the first novel from Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women, the biggest publishing sensation of 2019.
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